


all things change

by SafelyCapricious



Category: Leverage
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-08
Updated: 2015-08-08
Packaged: 2018-04-13 16:58:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4529892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SafelyCapricious/pseuds/SafelyCapricious
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>First, terrorists contaminate the water in twelve major cities throughout the world. </p><p>Second, American government officials get on the air and tell everyone in those cities not to drink the water.</p><p>Third, corruption. This one goes without saying.</p><p>Fourth, Leverage Consulting gets involved.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all things change

First, terrorists contaminate the water in twelve major cities throughout the world.

(Well, not really first for them – they had years of planning before that, but they also called themselves ‘Freedom Fighters’, so no one was really interested in their frame of reference.)

Second, American government officials get on the air and tell everyone in those cities not to drink the water – not even to use it to wash their dishes – and that they’ll be getting water rations. Every person gets a set volume of water. People can chose to buy more from approved companies. (Some of the other countries affected handle it better. Others, worse.)

Third, corruption. This one goes without saying.

Fourth, Leverage Consulting gets involved when a family starts to be denied the water ration for their little girl because she’s in the hospital so often that the argument is made the family doesn’t need her water.

“Well?” demands Sophie.

Nate rubs his chin, eyes fixed on the screens behind Hardison, “Do you have any idea what this means?” he asks, gesturing at the complex chemical formula written there.

Hardison shrugs before gesticulating with both hands. “Look man, I was up half the damn night re-learning chemistry to try to figure this shit out, and from what I read this shouldn’t be possible – look!” he zooms in and points enthusiastically at a carbon in the chemical formula, “Look at how many bonds that has – that should not be physically possible.”

“So what does this mean?” Nate asks.

“Magic,” Parker declares decisively.

“There is no such thing as – Hardison! Again? What have you been tellin’ her?” Hardison holds his hands up in the face of Eliot’s glare.

Parker rolls her eyes. “No, look –“ she rounds the table and pokes at the tablet for a minutes before Hardison helps her set it up so she can draw on it, her symbols showing up on the screens.

Sophie’s eyes glaze over as the contents get even more scientific.

Hardison can recognize some of the things she’s drawing, they’d shown up in his research the night before, be he has no idea what she’s doing with it. “What…how?” he asks as Parker finally finishes with a flourish, the original formula has been changed with the addition of something and…

“They’re adding it to water, it’s unstable on its own but you add some extra hydrogen and oxygen and – see?”

And yeah, the formula up there _does_ look more like the sorts of things that make sense but…

“How did you do that?” Eliot asks, odd look on his face and tone in his voice that says he’s not entirely sure he wants to know.

Parker blinks at him, down at the tablet then back at him before laughing. “Everyone can do that! Don’t be silly.” And she scampers back to her seat.

Hardison considers hunting Archie down so he can punch him in the jaw for making Parker think that she’s anything less but extraordinary but, no, even for an old dude he’s fit and – he’ll take Eliot. He can tell by the look on Eliot’s face that he wants to do it too.

“Okay, so that solves our impossible compound issue, now what does it do. Hardison?” Nate has that look like a plan is coming together in his head.

“Gimme a minute,” Hardison says as he starts to poke at his tablet. This he made an app for, and it’s going to be really cool if it actually works. He peers at the new formula and swipes it in, making sure nothing translates wrong and then he waits. Twenty seconds later he blinks down at his tablet. “Uh, guys?” The noise of their conversation doesn’t stop or soften, so he tries again, “Guys!”

They stop and look at him, expectant.

He takes a deep breath and tries, “So, it’ll cause mutations in humans.”

Nate grimaces and Sophie puts a hand on his arm before asking, softly, “Cancers?”

Hardison shakes his head. “Nope,” he pops the ‘p’ to buy himself a little time and then asks, “How much you guys know about the X-Men?”

The briefing goes rapidly downhill from there.

Seventeen days later the family has their water ration back and the team can head home.

Nate reminds the team, but mostly Hardison, that they don’t know what, exactly, the drugged water could do long term and that taking any would be a mistake, and here’s the thing: Hardison has been wishing for superpowers since he got placed with Nana. (Before that he wished for things like not to have a jerk roommate and for food that he could eat.)

Comic books and movies and every form of entertainment tell him that you get superpowers in three ways: A. You’re born with it. B. You get it at puberty. C. Ridiculous accident, likely with radioactive material.

He wasn’t born with it, so he waits for puberty and he is so ready.

Puberty comes and goes.

Puberty sucks, but what sucks more is that he never develops powers.

It’s more depressing than when his Hogwarts Letter didn’t show up. But he has his computers and so he throws himself into that instead – he may not have superpowers in his genes, but he can still do things with a computer that should be impossible. (Things that are _definitely_ illegal.)

So he moves on. He does.

But now there’s a chance of option C and it isn’t even radioactive? And okay, the city they’re leaving has all of the water shut down, nothing comes out of the taps but air, but he’s a _hacker_ and he has the best crew ever and it would be like hacking facebook, easy and full of rewards.

He doesn’t do it though.

And he feels like he’s grown so much as a person. He can remember that time that Nate walked into his office after he’d brought in some of his action figures to decorate a shelf. The other man had jerked badly enough that Hardison was worried he’d done himself serious injury, and his face had changed. Fallen was maybe the right word. It was the look Nate used to get a lot, that he used to cover with booze and – it’s the Sam face. He still makes it sometimes, but less often and Hardison thinks that says a lot for how the team is healing him. (Is healing all of them.)

Nate’s right, they don’t know what the water could do long term and he’s pretty sure that if Nate loses any of them – his new family – he’ll lose it.

So Hardison doesn’t take any water back with them.

Parker, however, does.

She doesn’t do anything with it, she was just bored and it seemed like something interesting to steal. She’s never stolen _water_ before.

Three weeks later it turns out it doesn’t matter – the terrorist organization is bigger than anyone had thought and much better organized. The twelve cities were a diversion, it had been put into various other sources, into crops, soft drinks, _beer_.

The fallout is massive – government officials arrested left and right, packets being sold of chemicals to make your food and water safe – getting one that did nothing was lucky as the bad ones sometimes killed you, panic and mayhem.

It takes a year for things to calm down, a year of no one developing telepathy (not that the common public _knows_ that’s the concern, but that’s what Hardison at least is waiting for) or dying.

A year and some change later, that’s when it starts. A news anchor teleports, a cashier who’s shot by a burglar has the bullet bounce right off her chest, people start to turn green and blue and orange. People start to get sick.

Not many, but enough.

Nate starts to get a pinched look around his face whenever he looks at anyone on the team, like he’s waiting for the blow to land. Hardison can relate.

Parker isn’t taking it seriously at all, Eliot just grunts whenever someone mentions it and Sophie is trying far too hard to be unconcerned about the whole thing.

Hardison wants powers – he does. But if he gets them and Parker or Eliot or Sophie or Nate  _die..._ well, he doesn’t want powers at that price.

When Sophie breaks the door handle it’s actually a relief.

She’s standing in the entranceway, staring at the crushed ball it’s become in her hand and says, slightly frantic, “I just turned it!”

Hardison is standing behind her, so he can see when Nate understands – the relief on his face. And Hardison is jealous. Oh, he’s relieved that Sophie isn’t going to die, that Nate isn’t going to watch someone else waste away in a hospital room but – Eliot interrupts by demanding that they measure Sophie’s strength now.

From there it’s a waiting game. They spend nearly all of their time together these days, so whenever Sophie was exposed it was likely the rest of them were as well. So they wait.

And wait.

And _wait_.

Then Hardison phases his hands through his keyboard and shorts out the whole thing.

He’d thought that his options were awesome super powers or death – powers that would hurt his babies had not even made his list of things to be concerned about.

Still, Eliot is relieved – claps him on the shoulder and squeezes, makes him an amazing sandwich for dinner.

Nate looks nearly as relieved as he did when Sophie destroyed the door, and Hardison feels warm and fuzzy from that – he’d feel more warm and fuzzy if he hadn’t shorted the microwave trying to reheat a hot pocket.

Sophie smiles, and Parker is jealous.

Well, she’s jealous until Eliot takes her off to the side for a chat and then she loudly declares that phasing through safes is ‘cheating’, but he probably needs the help so that’s okay. He isn’t really insulted, not much.

Hardison having trouble touching his computers means the rest of the team takes turns on them, as he directs from over their shoulders.

He’s still not sure how Eliot managed to get a virus on the thing – he was literally watching everything he did and yet.

Eliot isn’t allowed on the computers again.

Parker he gets addicted to World of Warcraft – he’s not even sorry.

Sophie is pretty good at taking directions, but she definitely buys shoes with the marks money before they route it where it needs to go. Plus she accidentally types too hard and breaks a keyboard when she gets excited.

Nate is…very good. Oddly good. Weirdly, supernaturally good. And he seems shocked about it.

Now Hardison knows where Parker is coming from, because finding out that Nate has some sort of technopathy is just insult upon injury – not only can he not touch his babies for fear of shorting something out, but Nate can do things just instinctively that Hardison had to teach himself through trial and error and –

Eliot takes him aside for a talk too. Points out how just because someone else on the team got what he’s known for, doesn’t mean he’s not still the best, that he’s not still the one with experience. And besides, they’re family and it doesn’t matter that they have the wrong powers, they still have powers and that means they’re alive.

It’s only then that Hardison realizes that if anyone on the team deserved super strength, it would be Eliot. But he’s zen about it. Weirdly zen about it.

Eliot shrugs and squeezes the back of Hardison’s neck. “I can still protect you lot, that’s all that matters.” And he walks away.

No one realizes what’s happening with Parker, not even Parker, until she’s at gunpoint with both Sophie and Eliot too far away to get to her, Hardison tied up and Nate unconscious – and she convinces the man to give her the gun and walk away. Sophie coaches her through it, but there’s something very compelling about her voice and –

So that’s kind of a distressing power for Parker to have.

No one says it, but they can all tell they’re thinking it.

When questioned about it she wrinkles her nose and says, “Yeah, I figured it out a few weeks ago. But it’s _cheating_. If he hadn’t been planning to kill me I wouldn’t’ve done it.”

Hardison wants to shake her – for not telling him that she’d gotten a power, that she was going to be okay, for not telling the team what it was and for somehow being the best among them who, when faced with the ability to convince people of anything with her voice, she doesn’t even do it. (Later she’ll confess that she sometimes uses it to get extra fortune cookies at the Chinese restaurant.)

Now it’s just Eliot.

Hardison has learned how to mostly keep from wrecking his electronic equipment at this point, so he looks up numbers.

Only about 3.5% of the population has ended up in the hospital, with about 92.3% then having superficial powers – things like a new tongue color, or their sweat smells like pine trees, or when they get mad they develop eyespots on their cheeks. The remaining 4.2% of the population has powers like theirs – things that aren’t cosmetic and that they can do something with. (He suspects those numbers may be off, people lying in the census either for or against better powers, the government is trying to figure out how to regulate things, but with a president who now has some lovely butterfly wings that he doesn’t like to take out in public, things are slow going.)

Hardison is glad, at least, that Eliot’s chances of turning blue are so much higher than his chance of death.

Weeks pass and nothing changes. Then months, then years.

Sophie and Nate leave them, and they do okay.

Hardison becomes convinced that Eliot has some new embarrassing mark somewhere, maybe his mutation is a tramp stamp! But it’s years before he gets the chance to check for himself.

He’s sprawled, naked and sated and sweaty, against Eliot, certain the other man has no weird marks, when Parker leans over his chest to poke the hitter in the cheek. “Hey, did you see this?”

Eliot covers his face with a hand and groans, “Parker.”

She pokes him again, easily evading his lazy bat. “I’m serious, did you see this? And if yes, it’s not what motivated you to, you know…”

Hardison has no idea what’s going on, but Eliot drops his hand and grabs Parker’s, resting the both of them against Hardison’s chest and says, “Parker, darlin', no. I didn’t – I saw it as a possibility but you gotta  _know_ I only act if the possibility is one of you dyin’, and I promise you, us not having sex did not end in death.”

Hardison sits up as quickly as he can, pinned as he is, and scoots to the edge of the bed. “Wait, hold up – you have fucking foresight?”

Eliot shrugs and Parker wrinkles her nose.

“And you didn’t tell _me_?”

Parker rolls her eyes and Eliot covers his face with his hand again, his voice coming out muffled, “I didn’t tell Parker either, up until right now I didn’t know she even _knew_.”

Hardison punches Eliot in the shoulder, and then has to shake out his hand because damnit that still hurts. “I was worried you idiot!”

Eliot scoffs. “You thought I had some weird marking and was too embarrassed to say, you haven’t been worried since the beginning and I _didn’t_ know then – if I’d realized when you were still worried I woulda told you.”

Hardison nods to himself, thinking back to times on jobs when Eliot would insist that something go one way, even if it blew their original con all to hell, and how cheerful Parker was to let him do it, time and again.

He lets Parker pull him back into their cuddle with minimal grumbling.

**Author's Note:**

> This was my first time playing in the Leverage universe, though I love them so, I hope you all enjoyed very much! Thank you for reading! And extra thanks to the [Leverage-Thing-aton](http://leveragethingathon.tumblr.com/) for organizing it and making me feel guilty for not writing here before! 
> 
> _My_ writing blog can be found [here](http://capriciouswrites.tumblr.com/), but if you wanna gush Leverage at me (which I would love), come [this a ways](http://safelycapricious.tumblr.com/).


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